Meta-trends in marketing for 2017

This time every year my LinkedIn and Twitter feeds start filling up with articles on marketing trends and predictions for the following year. The earliest this year landed in May which is questionably early and there’s been a steadily increasing stream since October. These trend articles contain a wide array of predictions so I read, categorised and processed the articles to extract the consensus view on the top trends in marketing in 2017.

To extract the meta-trends for 2017, I applied a few simple rules:

• The article needs be to about broad marketing trends, so I ignored ones with titles like “mobile content marketing trends in ophthalmology for 2017”;
• The entity writing or publishing the article must have more Twitter followers than me – I set the lower limit at 5,000 followers;
• Marketing is digital and digital is marketing, so I included articles which purported to be about digital marketing only.

This resulted in 30 marketing trends articles with 201 total trends which fall into 69 classes, from entities with Twitter followings ranging from 5,487 to 11.2 million. The top trends when ranked by the total number of mentions and the total Twitter following of the predicting entities are:

1. AI & machine learning including chatbots
2. Data science / analytics
3. Augmented & virtual reality
4. IoT & wearables
5. Live-streaming video
6. Video content
7. Personalization

These top trends align closely with key focus areas for us in Accenture Digital. AI & machine learning appears in 20 of the 30 articles and data science / analytics appears in 13 of the 30. As the leader of a large marketing analytics and data science team which has pivoted from traditional statistical to AI & machine learning based solutions in recent years, it’s great to see the market consensus putting these areas in the top spots by a wide margin. What was surprising though was that the associated “war for talent” in marketing for deep data science, artificial intelligence and machine learning skills was only mentioned twice. In my experience, these skills are in great demand and organizations’ marketing analytics teams can be under-resourced and struggle to keep pace with the exponential improvements in AI.

I was initially surprised that personalization only managed number seven on the list, given I expect it would have been top three or even first in previous years. One potential hypothesis for this can be gleaned from how it is described in several of the trends articles. I would paraphrase this as the real-time exploitation of any and all customer data for the purposes of achieving a financial objective. The importance of trust and transparency with consumers, fears over cyber security and being “right-time not real-time” in marketing all figure in the top third of trend mentions, which may be competing with what I believe is an increasingly out-dated definition of personalization.

Two thirds of the trends only appear once or twice in articles, with many of these coming from the more niche publishers - including some competing predictions such as ones about both the death of Twitter and its resurgence! However, the top categories from this meta-analysis should be high priorities now and through 2017 for marketers because those who excel in them will very likely be rewarded with significant competitive advantage and growing market shares.

All views expressed here are personal and do not reflect the views of my employer, Accenture.